The life of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was dedicated to deep questions of life, love, and longing. In Letters to a Young Poet, we find Rilke offering direct encouragement to a young aspiring poet – with encouragement, profound insight on creativity, solitude, and the inner journey.

How does one find encouragement when living an authentic contemplative life – which brings us into states of solitude, loneliness, and longing? How do we nurture ourselves and others, while facing our losses with honesty and courage? How do we make sense of death as part of what Rilke called “the Whole”? How do we “dance the orange,” as he invites us to do, with ecstatic joy without turning from the anguish of suffering?

Such questions, charting a spiritual path that embraces ecstasy in the face of pain, shape the heart of Rilke’s vision in his Sonnets to Orpheus. Written just over a century ago, he claimed that he “experienced” them as a “dictation” that came to him over the course of several weeks in February, 1922. An immediate sensation when they were published in 1923, they continue to draw readers, now a century later, by their bold invitation to engage life across the arc of its fullness—embracing both “beauty and terror,” as he once put it.

In 1936, with chaos looming in Europe and the world, the first English translator of these poems, J. B. Leishman, wrote that “I feel, in reading [these poems], that we have come round the spiral to another ‘dawn of consciousness,’ where language is in the making, and where myth and symbol must often supply the place of not yet thinkable thoughts. No other writer is so full of the future; no other gives us such thrilling intimations of that inheritance on whose threshold we are standing, and which our civilization may be about to enter if it does not perish through its own destructive forces.” How much truer is that vision in our times!

Join us as we explore the gifts of Rilke’s poems as a form of “spiritual exercises,” one addressed to Orpheus, that luminous figure from ancient Greek mythology whose song enchanted the wild animals and restored harmony to a disordered world. What might these poems say to us in our conflicted times? How might they invite us to turn from the depleting world of “action without vision,” as he put it, and remind us to inhabit our lives with a spacious courage and radical hope – a posture needed more than ever from spiritual directors and companions?

Join us for a transformative journey into the depths of what Rilke called our “heart-work.”